Microsoft Azure API Management Reviews

We use Microsoft Azure API Management with our coding.

All we need to do is run our specific code because the dependencies are already there. 

I would like to see more security features become available. For example, the integration on premises could be better. Things could be more user-friendly. Currently, the integration we work with is more complex than it needs to be.

I have been using Microsoft Azure API Management for the past thirteen months.

I am finding Microsoft Azure API Management stable.

Day by day we are increasing the usage of Microsoft Azure API Management.

My current experience with technical support has been good.

We were using DIS. We needed to install the run times, libraries, and install operating systems. We had to make a lot of initial preparations to get the process ready to operate. Now it is already available and ready to operate with Microsoft Azure API Management.

I would rate the initial setup process a four out of five.  The setup was basic and good.

We do our implementation through one of our partners. The configuration was around fifteen to twenty minutes long.

There is no investment funding or upfront cost needed. 

There are no licensing fees we pay on a monthly basis.

We compared it with DIS because most of the time we were using DIS, for such kind of deployment.

Many people are using the API, and it is a prominent feature currently being used. I would rate Microsoft Azure API Management an eight out of ten.

In general, we use it for the front application, like the mobile banking application or some other service stuff. We found that it's easier to maintain these internet connections and so on, on the cloud.

In general, we started with Microsoft Azure Cloud as we needed a close integration with our internal or Office solution. In case of Microsoft, Azure Active Directory is easily integrated within the Microsoft platform, including Office. In particular, in API Management, used as front-end APIs, it's easy to manage. Now, we are looking ahead to the hosted solution, which is very nice. 

We use Microsoft due to the stability of the company. 

It's efficient enough and it's just enough for our needs to manage rules and so aforth for API management. We use it due to Microsoft's reputation. We need a stable provider. We cannot play with some providers. 

It is easy to set up. 

The solution is scalable. It is stable as a product as well. 

It's okay. It's not as good as Google. For instance, in Apigee, in Google.

One of the most important improvements for us would be if it supported the HTTP/3 version and new protocol over a quick connection. It's a relatively new standard since 2020. 

I've used the solution for about three years. 

It is a stable product. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash. The performance is good. 

While it is scalable, there is some costs involved with expanding. 

We have about 100 people using the solution at the company in terms of deployment. In terms of clients using the solution, that's in the millions. 

We have a premium subscription. We have a local company, a local Microsoft office. We do not have a problem with the support from Microsoft.

We used a CA solution before, and CA was sold to Broadcom and everything changed, politics and so and so. We had to disable CA platform due to the provider. We believe the same issues will not happen to Microsoft.

The initial setup is very easy. It's not complex at all. 

There is a special group that is  responsible for the support and implementation of the platform.

I'm aware of Google, or Apigee, and it's quite a robust product. 

We are a customer and end-user.

It is a subscription service. It's definitely not on-premises in our organization. We do have our core system on-premises, of course.

I would recommend the solution. People have to first understand the different types of subscriptions, however. There are four of them, developer, and intermediates, and then premium, and it's costly. That said, it's not that expensive. It's a very technical piece of software. I can say it's stable and it satisfies our needs. It's just a bit complex. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

I like API Management's ability to do hybrid cloud stuff.

Some of the DevOps stuff could be easier to work with. The migration paths are a little complicated, and moving code around could be more seamless. There should be less manual migration when several teams work together to publish code to the DevOps. 

For example, if you and I are working on the same application, and there are conflicts, you should be able to resolve those conflicts more easily. It shows you the conflicts, and you have to fix them yourself. Better conflict resolution with software migration is what I recommend.

I've been working with Azure API Management for maybe five years in total.

Azure API Management is relatively stable.

Azure is a pay-as-you-go model. You build out your virtual environment and pay a monthly price depending on CPU cores, storage, etc.

I rate Azure API Management nine out of 10. I prefer Microsoft products to the others out there because Microsoft has always catered to software developers as opposed to Amazon or Google, which do a lot of other things. Microsoft has always had the best development toolsets, and it's better for application developers.

The solution has pretty stable capabilities.

Their construction tool allows users to easily publish information about the API. It's basically just one click.

You can configure the subscription management onsite and link everything.

The developer portal that exposed the API documentation is great. You can just test the APIs in a very easy way. 

The web portal is useful. You can build a pretty comprehensive portal where users can sign in and you can basically leave the API there.

The API management provided offers good integration with different management systems, like OpenID, for example.

The user management is pretty seamless.

Pricing is definitely an aspect that can be improved. They should offer an additional free tier. For example, if there was a tier for new accounts created, it may help their services by getting people onboarded. Once you will give access to someone and they try it they'll see, "Okay, it works and you can pretty quickly add something on top of it". After that, the client will end up staying, and probably paying.

The cost is also complex in terms of calculating how much everything will ultimately be priced at. It's not straightforward as it takes into account multiple factors.

Technical support could be more flexible and try to meet the client's needs a bit more effectively.

The solution needs to provide more use cases so that we can refer them to clients. It will help answer any questions in relation to performance and load management.

I've been using the solution for about a year at this point.

There are some bugs that exist in this construction tool for the developer portal. We are submitting these bugs to Azure, so they already know about it. Overall, it's pretty stable.

In terms of Azure technical support, we've had no issues in regards to response times. They are prompt. However, in some particular cases, they unable to be flexible. For example, with MQTT blockers, while you might want another port, they might tell you to use the hosted solution in order to get them to configure it. We'd just like them to have more flexibility with requests like this.

In terms of corporate security nowadays, it's very important to be flexible. At the end of the day we get stuck in the bureaucracy. If they could practice flexibility, it would be better for their clients, who may not have the wiggle room on their end.  

That said, we're mostly satisfied with their level of service.

The solution has a kind of calculator and it's not always straightforward to figure out the logic in pricing. There are lots of services that are managed in different ways. For a non-technical person, it's a nightmare to figure everything out.

At the end of the day, you have to build approximate pricing for the solution. According to my experiences in multiple projects, you do get preliminary pricing that is close to or the same as the estimate.  

Right now, for a particular client, we're using a managed version of the solution, however, in the future, I foresee us hosting it somewhere in the cloud.

We're using the most up to date version of the solution.

Overall, the solution has a lot of great features. There are a few bugs here and there, however, a the end of the day, there's lots of value provided.

I'd rate the solution at an eight, on a scale from one to ten. It's got a rather high cost and still has some areas that need some improvement. Otherwise, I'd rate it higher.

We're a bank, so one of our primary use cases for API Management is integrating our API with third parties that provide financial policies. Sometimes they want to use our services, like payment and customer inquiry, so we give them access to the API gateway. 

Azure API Management allows you to control who has access to your API gateways and assign permission levels to third parties if you want integration with third-party solutions. That has a couple of advantages. Those third parties can directly access your API directly, and you can set limits. It can also configure authentication on other API managers.

An API gateway is like a platform, and your API provides access to the resources in your environment, so this gateway is an intermediary between you and third parties. It's also the interface between your internal applications. For example, if you have a mobile app and internet banking, they can all be copied in the same API through that gateway. So, that was basically the use cases we have. So, we have almost all the API's behind the gateway.

I like API Management's sandbox feature. It's an environment where you can test out the API before putting it into production and connecting it to a live environment.

The hybrid part could be improved because API Management is entirely cloud-based, but some of our resources are on-prem, so formatting is an issue. Our goal is dual implementation. 

There's always room for improvement in terms of the user interface. Generally speaking, technology evolves, so any service provider needs to make their product as user-friendly as possible. In the next couple of years, we'll see more non-tech people handling tech solutions. The solution should be more accessible, so people can use it to create things without being very tech-savvy.

We've been using Azure API Management for about three years.

API Management is stable.

API Management is scalable. The licensing is structured so that you save more at a higher scale. The only limit to the scale is how much you're willing to pay. 

We have an enterprise support contract for Microsoft, and we don't have problems with them. 

We used IBM ESB before Azure API Management, and we're using both now. ESB isn't the same as API Management from a technology perspective. They have distinct functions, but they can do similar things. You can view an API on IBM ESB, but you can view and expose API on Azure API Management. They solve similar problems but are not exactly the same.

Deploying API Management is somewhat tricky depending on your level of technical knowledge. The first time we used it in production, we had it for a couple of months. The first month was an evaluation period, so we had it in a test environment to get a feel for how it works and possible complications. However, you could deploy it in a couple of weeks if you wanted. 

You only need about two to manage it, including one admin. It's more like a platform-as-a-service, so we don't need to do the normal maintenance we do on an on-prem platform. 

We deployed API Management in-house.

I can't disclose how much we pay monthly, but the pricing for Azure API Management is available online. It's pay as you go. The subscription packages have room for different scales. It's calculated by the number of apps or computers you use. You do not have to use the enterprise subscription. These subscriptions have different pricing, so you can find one to meet your needs for scalability.

I rate Azure API Management nine out of 10. Your choice of technology is based on your needs, budget, and C suite. Azure API Management is a good product, but there are some other good services, like Azure Connect, Google APG, and a couple of others. It depends on your needs.

Using a cloud solution has advantages because the client can immediately use the product. Another strong reason we use Azure API Management is that we heavily use Microsoft products in our organization, so Azure is a natural choice.

We have several layers in our infrastructure. Some of our layers are more connector-based and interfacing with our systems of record and outsource service providers. Right now, we use Microsoft Azure API Management for that. We're now deciding what to use for the process layer, which is more orchestration and data-mapping-based.

If you were truly a .NET shop and truly Microsoft cloud-centric, this is the most cloud-native offering, and there are some benefits to that. It's really easy to use for simple passthrough APIs. It feels more modern and compatible with people with .NET skill sets, and that's a strong selling point.

The solution's data mapping and orchestration are very code-intensive or require callouts to external systems. They seem suboptimal for the more complex use cases.

A simple installation is very easy, and I rate it ten out of ten. However, it goes to the other extreme when you try to do complex use cases, like orchestration, aggregation, and data mapping. For such scenarios, I rate the installation a five out of ten because of the code intensity and maintenance you would incur.

The solution appears cheaper because it's a cloud SaaS model. Its benefit is that you can use a small amount, and it'll appear very cheap. However, once you scale up to your full volume, it'll be more expensive because it'll incorporate a bunch of different services that are holistically more expensive than the alternative.

There are around ten key security characteristics I look for in a solution. On the surface, my analysis so far seems to indicate that Microsoft Azure API Management has the ability to deliver on those parameters. Given the close relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, we hope the solution will evolve more quickly and incorporate AI more fully, but we don't know for sure.

Our goal is to create a composable financial institution. We are trying to get developers not to be the bottleneck anymore but to be more agile, to grow market share, and to grow national reach. To do all those things, you need very agile, world-class APIs. There are ways to make both work for that. We'll have to evaluate which one is the shorter path.

I would recommend the solution for cloud-native Microsoft .NET shops with simple API requirements. However, I would not recommend it for multi-cloud, larger shops with more diverse or complicated use cases.

Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

Microsoft Azure API Management is used for integration across multiple services, API marketplace solutions, and information exchange solutions.

The most valuable features of the solution are its importing and publishing.

The solution’s security and performance could be improved.

I have been using Microsoft Azure API Management for four to five years.

I rate Microsoft Azure API Management an eight out of ten for stability.

Our clients for the solution are small, medium and enterprise businesses.

I rate Microsoft Azure API Management an eight out of ten for scalability.

Microsoft provides good premier support, but its general customer support is not that great.

Neutral

I rate Microsoft Azure API Management a seven out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

The solution can be deployed in five to ten minutes.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten.

Microsoft Azure API Management is a cloud-based solution. Microsoft Azure API Management is a flexible, scalable, and easy-to-use solution.

Overall, I rate Microsoft Azure API Management an eight out of ten.

We have a couple of use cases for this  product. It's fully cloud-native and can handle telco distribution for end-to-end distribution management. Five or six years ago, we made a  fantastic product with microservices. I was responsible for rolling it out for a large telco in Qatar. They had no distribution or end-to-end visibility or platform. So we helped them to move to a cloud platform for their entire distribution and operation. The beauty of that product is when you look at the telco distribution standpoint your maybe five or ten thousand merchant ecosystem will be connected to that platform. It helps with generating several transactions in a minute or second. And it gives that kind of scalability in the back end. 

The other use case was for banking transactions. If you have your core banking platform that is legacy, if a user wants to bring in a lot of additional alternatives, they need to have some kind of a platform for enhancements. We made a cloud to bring some kind of their operations to the cloud. We made a transaction platform for them so that their merchants could access transactions.

The API management is very good. You have sophisticated dashboards that help you to understand what's really going on - in addition to whatever security layer that you can bring on top of that. It is easy to manage front and backend APIs.

You can put on your own security layer so that you know only the authorized people are accessing your back-end systems through the gateway. In addition to that, you have sophisticated dashboards and reporting for storage logs or logging. That is quite useful, specifically in the banking sector. 

You can limit items by parameters such as geography or private VPMs. 

You have different pricing tiers and pricing is based depending on the traffic. You can go to basic pricing if you like. Depending on your traffic, you have licensing options.

Microsoft manages everything so you can focus on building applications and deploying them.

The platform components are quite interesting. 

I'm not sure if there are certain areas needed for improvement. I haven't explored its shortcomings. So far, the requirements have been met.

Maybe the customization could be a bit better. 

My team found difficulty in migrating APIs from one platform to this platform. We could export and import properly. We made a complete API for a UAT environment, and when we moved the APIs, we ran into issues. 

They don't have a standard local IP. They only have a public IP.

I've used the solution for six to eight years or so. 

I'd rate the stability eight out of ten. It is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution scales well. I'd rate it ten out of ten. It's easy to expand as needed. 

We have both medium-sized and enterprise-level customers. 

Technical support has been fine. We are happy with their level of support. 

Positive

I have worked with other competing products, such as Apigee and AWS.

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. I'd rate the ease of deployment eight out of ten.

The provisioning takes a couple of minutes. Then you need to do some programming. 

The pricing is reasonable. I'd rate the cost in terms of affordability seven out of ten. 

The premium tier is too expensive for medium-sized organizations. However, the local IP only is offered at the premium tier. 

I did not compare this solution to others since I was promoting Microsoft at the time. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

People should explore API management. You do get full control of your API, and from a security standpoint, you have a good understanding of the touchpoints and far more control of your traffic. You know who is accessing your services. Even if a company has legacy systems, it should have an API gateway in front of its legacy systems.

We went with Microsoft since we were Microsoft partners.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.